HRL Laboratories, LLC, has made a breakthrough in metallurgy, developing a technique for successfully 3D printing high-strength aluminum alloys — including types Al7075 and Al6061—that opens the door to additive manufacturing of engineering-relevant alloys.

Something which is now common ground for small and remarkably innovative companies since the early 2000's (See http://www.socinser.com/) is presented as J&J innovation here. Furthermore, the reasons are old too, and the workflow is, again, common ground for many others: CT SCAN +3D model +custom design + 3D printing personalised implant and surgical tools. I will not cite them all, big or small. I hope they have something else under their sleeves and just show this when they feel it safe and riskless.

Boeing Co is beingawarded a $679 million fixed-price, incentive-firm target U.S.defense contract for the procurement of seven EA-18G aircraftand associated airborne electronic attack kits, and five F/A-18Eaircraft, the Pentagon said on Monday. (Reporting by Eric Beech)

Carlos Garcia Pando's insight:

The story here is Each Hornet features at least 150 laser sintered metal parts. There is another point: Whereas General Electric focuses on vertical integration (they want to do it all in-house) Boeing intends to empower the supply chain. “We want to see the supply base be efficient, productive and profitability,” says Leo Christodoulou, the Director of Structures and Materials, Enterprise Operations and Technology at Boeing. Furthermore, more than 50,000 AM parts are flying on Boeing aircraft. Source: goo.gl/ISZmh8

Australian company Fastbrick Robotics is developing a brick-laying 3D printer robot capable of laying up to 1,000 bricks in an hour. The robot, the Hadrian X, is expected to hit the Australian market within the next year.

Carlos Garcia Pando's insight:

Which of these would you call a “3D printer”?

* Nr. 1: It is able to read both digital and paper plans, even hand-sketched incomplete drawings and annotations, out of scale or with bad perspectives, thanks to its multiplatform “analog” and “bio-integrated” intelligence. It has self-correction and auto-adaptive and flexible programming features. It is able to carry its own bricks to the working place or buying more if necessary. * Nr. 2: It is able to read purpose-made machine code and lay bricks very accurately. * Nr. 3: Pumps concrete to the exact point guided by a program which resides in a co-worker (a human) with most of the abilities described in Nr. 1. With the right kind of concrete and time it can create complex 3d structures if needed, or just lay concrete on flat surfaces, on layer at a time. * Nr. 4: Using a plasma beam and a metal wire feed it is able to create pure 3-Dimensional structures around an object, following true three-dimensional trajectories onto complex surfaces and curvatures, angles, cavities, etc., with about ten to twenty simultaneously interpolated axes, with the same extra features of Nr.1.

The answer: Nr. 2 is called a “3dprinter”. Why?

It’s just a specialized robot to replace humans in hard tasks, but if you call it a “3dprinter” you get attention from the news, public, investors, etc. It’s a big and accurate one, mounted on a truck. And it is able of laying -I would say layering, as in the additive manufacturing- a huge amount of bricks per hour. This is good. Next version will have tools to cut and grind bricks to different sizes according to a CAD file. It may also pump mortar in the required places, although the article says nothing.

The robotic achievement here is amazing enough to be front page in itself, but Robotics is not the buzz word any more. Now you have to call it a 3D-printer.

An industry analyst at Canalys confirms that HP will now have a cost and speed lead over the competition, but the big hiccup is that the HP printers offer a speed and cost supportive of production runs for the products that require monochrome thermoplastic only. So all the hoopla on cost and performance was for printers that only solve limited problems and is far from fully functional.

One in every 160 infants in the UAE is born with congenital heart disease, or about 500 per year –a much higher rate than the rest of the world. That’s a dire statistic in itself but add to that the fact that 75% of those babies will require surgery in order to survive and 66% will need that surgery within the first six months of life. Furthermore, 25-30% will require more than one, and sometimes as many as three, surgeries.

Carlos Garcia Pando's insight:

I guess it is the surgeons who save the lives. Apart from using a plethora of fantastic and advanced tools, 3D printing being the newcomer, they develop amazing skills that technology cannot replace yet. 3D-printing is of little or no use without the appropriate highly-reliable imaging tools that generate the 3D models to print. For the same purpose Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR) would be far cheaper, and certainly faster than 3D printing, while they source the same information.

The article also points to another -although otherwise common among the general population- problem: the lack of ability to processing 2D information and creating an accurate three-dimensional mental model. In the case of surgeons, reading a CAT scan or other computer-generated two-dimensional information and producing a diagnosis: "a 3D printed model of the child’s heart showed an obstruction that hadn’t been caught originally".

Do you remember seeing so many super-hyped headlines when ultrasound diagnosis tools came to play in the cardiac surgery field? Or any transcatheter valve replacements etc.? Or with the most advanced haemostatic systems and procedures?

When I find this kind of headlines I always praise the humble screwdriver, pliers, hammer, and ask myself: "when will we read a headline like these, indicating that thanks to a screwdriver and a hammer the first manned rocket reached the moon?"

The last time engineers designed a civilian turboprop engine from scratch for mass-production, humans had not yet landed on the moon. Unlike jet engines, turboprops typically power small commercial shuttles and personal aircraft, but they still represent a multibillion-dollar market. As a result, a new machine created by a team at GE Aviation is now …

Due to multiphoton absorption it allows the realization of complex 3D structures with spatial resolution down to a 100 nm level. In a recent effort to demonstrate the capabilities of MPL a group of nanotechnologists has produced a tiny castle (230 µm x 250 µm x 360 µm) directly on a tip of a pencil. Its design was developed in cooperation with Daniela Mitterberger and Tiziano Derme (MäID – FutureRetrospectiveNarrative). The Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) image of produced structure appeared on the cover of the recent book “Multiphoton Lithography: Techniques, Materials, and Applications”.

U.S. conglomerate General Electric (GE.N) has agreed to buy privately held German 3D printing firm Concept Laser for 549 million euros ($599 million), it said on Thursday, after its bid for rival SLM Solutions (AM3D.DE) failed.

Just put a an adaptor and a bit of software. Of course is the already proved process which does the trick, the chemical and biological science underneath. Don't they have engineers at the College Station? But apparently someone realized there are cheap, programmable cartesian robots with heaters to do this task. But it's not thanks to this, no; now we have a "3dprinter that detects infectious diseases and amplifies DNA". Isn't it amazing how just saying "3dprint" everything becomes a miracle?

They could have hacked a 3D coordinate measuring machine, a CMM, which is basically the same thing, only more expensive. But the headline would not be as attractive as this one.

3d printed leg cast includes music, gyroscope, accelerometer, and WiFi for both health analysis and fun.

Carlos Garcia Pando's insight:

A bit of too expensive development to increase hype.

If this is an exercise of just putting as many things together as you can, I believe there is a bottle opener missing. It should have an integrated counter (possible with the integrated arduino) so your doctor also knows about your drinking habits and doses. Furthermore, open a twitter account for it so it gets social and speaks with other casts too, reporting how boring or how active is its owner, what brand of bear he/she prefers, etc.

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